Two articles in The Washington Post on Sunday, February 20, by two of the paper's best reporters, set the mind to roam yet again over the question of strategies for liberals and Democrats.
First was Dan Balz's report on Howard Dean's first week as Democratic National Committee chairman. The piece was mostly devoted to letting Democrats of the left and the center go back and forth, not only on their opinions of Dean but on their views of whether the party needs to move to the left or the center. A few pages on, Tom Edsall's write-up of a symposium of 20 leading conservatives, held a few days prior at the Hudson Institute, showed ways in which figures on the right are at loggerheads with one another, too -- partly over President Bush's aggressive foreign policy, but chiefly over social morality, with religious conservatives and libertarians sharply at odds on the matter.
This is no surprise, or it shouldn't be. We've known for a long time about these striations within the conservative movement. But we've also observed conservatives' unanimity at election time, or when a major piece of legislation is up for consideration. We've explained this by citing their superior discipline. And it's true, they are more disciplined. Conservative people by nature are more likely to heed their authority figures than liberal people are.
Relatedly, we've also explained it by citing their much stronger focus on getting and holding power. They set most of their differences aside, we argue, in the interest of winning, and when they do have disputes, they deal with them privately. The February 20 New York Times piece by David L. Kirkpatrick, in which he scored the great scoop of getting David Wead to hand him over the Bush tapes, underscored this. Bush's insistence early in the 2000 campaign that the meeting with the religious right be private and unpublicized reflected his obvious realization that a public meeting could make him beholden to a group that scares a lot of Americans, so he made that group the promises he felt he needed to make behind closed doors. And the group, rather than denouncing him and running to the newspapers, said, “We understand, that's fine.”
Both explanations are true, and I've written about both at different times. But both are about tactics. But what, I've been wondering lately, if there's a deeper answer to the question of greater conservative sense of purpose? What if it's not just about tactics, but about philosophy?
I've long had the sense, and it's only grown since I've moved to Washington, that conservatives talk more about philosophy, while liberals talk more about strategy; also, that liberals generally, and young liberals in particular, are somewhat less conversant in their creed's history and urtexts than their conservative counterparts are (my excellent young staff excepted, naturally; I'm mostly wondering if young Democratic Hill aides have read, for example, The Vital Center or any John Dewey or Walter Lippmann or any number of things like that).
This came through, in fact, in the Balz and Edsall pieces. Go read them if you like. Balz's account of the Democrats has them talking about things like positioning themselves to be tougher on national security, or whether the congressional Democrats should be more confrontational toward Bush. They're talking tactics.
In Edsall's piece, though, the conservatives are debating ideas. Grover Norquist and Robert Woodson, from an outfit called the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, engage in a debate about the nature of poverty; others discuss the morality-versus-personal-liberty question. Both conversations, as Edsall conveys them (and we can be sure that he conveyed them accurately), were far less about tactics than ideas.
One explanation for the difference in this particular case is that Balz was interviewing politicos, while Edsall had attended an ideas forum. This helps explain the difference, but it can't be written off solely to that. Democrats just don't talk about fundamental ideas enough, and anyone -- a person, a movement, a political party -- can't really, deeply, profoundly know what he or she or it stands for without such conversations.
I happened to mention Dewey and Lippmann above. In the 1920s, they engaged in a famous debate about the value of the opinion of the citizenry in a democratic society. Broadly speaking, Lippmann took the elitist view, and Dewey the populist one, but the debate had far more nuance than this sentence suggests and raised difficult, fundamental questions about liberalism and representative government, many of which remain relevant.
I know this will sound really silly, but I'd like for Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean and every other Democrat who's interested to read Dewey and Lippmann and have a session in which they sit down and talk about it. Or a much simpler assignment, because it involves less reading and they're busy people: Read Lyndon Johnson's historic speech “To Fulfill These Rights” -- his commencement speech at Howard University in 1965 and the strongest philosophical justification for the Great Society that he ever issued in a single place -- and then sit down and debate what he said and figure out what their conclusions about LBJ mean for them today. Or Harry Truman's speech to Congress laying out the Truman Doctrine. Et cetera, et cetera.
I have another idea about what Democrats need to do, which I'll get to next week or the following. But they should begin by realizing that talking about “positioning” isn't enough. It's a second-step question, and it skips the first-step question, which is, what do we believe? Then, once they have a handle on what they believe, they can talk about positioning. Admittedly, it's a harder question to answer, but they'll have a hard time selling themselves to 51 percent until they've answered it.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
